Famous Ache Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Ache poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous ache poems. These examples illustrate what a famous ache poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Amy Lowell
The path runs straight between the flowering rows,
A moonlit path, hemmed in by beds of bloom,
Where phlox and marigolds dispute for room
With tall, red dahlias and the briar rose.
'T is reckless prodigality which throws
Into the night these wafts of rich perfume
Which sweep across the garden like a plume.
Over the trees a single bright star glows.
Dear garden of my childhood,...Read more of this...
by
Walter Savage Landor
MOTHER, I cannot mind my wheel;
My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
O, if you felt the pain I feel!
But O, who ever felt as I?
No longer could I doubt him true--
All other men may use deceit;
He always said my eyes were blue,
And often swore my lips were sweet....Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
I
There was an ancient City, stricken down
With a strange frenzy, and for many a day
They paced from morn to eve the crowded town,
And danced the night away.
I asked the cause: the aged man grew sad:
They pointed to a building gray and tall,
And hoarsely answered "Step inside, my lad,
And then you'll see it all."
Yet what are all...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
A message came from my youth of vanished days, saying, " I wait for
you among the quivering of unborn May, where smiles ripen for tears
and hours ache with songs unsung."
It says, "Come to me across the worn-out track of age, through
the gates of death. For dreams fade, hopes fail, the fathered
fruits of the year decay, but I am the...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying,
and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.
Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my
dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.
That vague sweetness made...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Muir
Our fathers all were poor,
Poorer our fathers' fathers;
Beyond, we dare not look.
We, the sons, keep store
Of tarnished gold that gathers
Around us from the night,
Record it in this book
That, when the line is drawn,
Credit and creditor gone,
Column and figure flown,
Will open into light.
Archaic fevers shake
Our healthy flesh and blood
Plumped in the passing day
And fed with pleasant food.
The fathers'...Read more of this...
by
Leonard Cohen
Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on
I'm just paying my rent every day
Oh in the Tower of Song
I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
JIMMY WIMBLETON listened a first week in June.
Ditches along prairie roads of Northern Illinois
Filled the arch of night with young bullfrog songs.
Infinite mathematical metronomic croaks rose and spoke,
Rose and sang, rose in a choir of puzzles.
They made his head ache with riddles of music.
They rested his head with beaten cadence.
Jimmy Wimbledon listened....Read more of this...
by
Lam Quang My
I tire of stopping wings of summer
You the slow run down of autumn
No boats at anchor in the sea of eyes
The shade of clouds floats melancholy
Does something wait for us
Upon the far horizon…
Winter sits upon the long-drawn barricade
The stones ache under circled wheels
Breeze borne images of mountain thorn and timeless place
Far off singing soothes nostalgic soul
Does someone wait for...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Little Annabelle to please,
(Lacking grace, I grant),
Grandpa down on hands and knees
Plays the elephant.
Annabelle shrieks with delight,
Bouncing up and down,
On his back and holding tight
To his dressing gown.
As they roll and bowl along,
Round and round the room,
There is sunshine and a song
'Spite December gloom.
Yet we hear not Grandpa's groans,
Hushed his beard inside,
As...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
it comes like a convict
squeezing through bars
and is gone before
the promptest siren
it suddenly turns
in the ear or rides
the eye of a thought
before dissolving
i have it in a faint
taste or shudder
an ache like a spring
high in the mountains
it was once called love
and now a longing
for a song to be heard
that doesn't bear singing...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our ***** ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall--
Foot suspended in its fall--
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.
Never another pet for me!
Let your place all...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Now Eddie Malone got a swell grammyfone to draw all the trade to his store;
An' sez he: "Come along for a season of song, which the like ye had niver before."
Then Dogrib, an' Slave, an' Yellow-knife brave, an' Cree in his dinky canoe,
Confluated near, to see an' to hear Ed's grammyfone make its dayboo.
Then Ed turned the crank, an'...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CCIV. Mira quel colle, o stanco mio cor vago. HE BIDS HIS HEART RETURN TO LAURA, NOT PERCEIVING THAT IT HAD NEVER LEFT HER. P. Look on that hill, my fond but harass'd heart!Yestreen we left her there, who 'gan to takeSome care of us and friendlier looks to dart;Now from...Read more of this...
by
George Herbert
O do not use me
After my sins! look not on my dessert,
But on your glory! Then you will reform
And not refuse me: for you only art
The mighty God, but I a silly worm;
O do not bruise me!
O do not urge me!
For what account can your ill steward make?
I have abused your...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
Had I but known yesterday,
Helen, you could discharge the ache
Out of the cloud;
Had I known yesterday you could take
The turgid electric ache away,
Drink it up with your proud
White body, as lovely white lightning
Is drunk from an agonised sky by the earth,
I might have hated you, Helen.
But since my limbs gushed full of fire,
Since from out...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
SOMEBODY’S little girl—how easy to make a sob story over who she was once and who she is now.
Somebody’s little girl—she played once under a crab-apple tree in June and the blossoms fell on the dark hair.
It was somewhere on the Erie line and the town was Salamanca or Painted Post or Horse’s Head.
And out of her hair she...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
When SUPERSTITION rul'd the land
And Priestcraft shackled Reason,
At GODSTOW dwelt a goodly band,
Grey monks they were, and but to say
They were not always giv'n to pray,
Would have been construed Treason.
Yet some did scoff, and some believ'd
That sinners were themselves deceiv'd;
And taking Monks for more than men
They prov'd themselves, nine out of ten,
Mere dupes of these Old Fathers hoary;
But read--and...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.
Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
The opiate throb...Read more of this...
by
Denise Levertov
The ache of marriage:
thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth
We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each
It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it
two by two in the ark of
the ache of it....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
She dealt her pretty words like Blades --
How glittering they shone --
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone --
She never deemed -- she hurt --
That -- is not Steel's Affair --
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh --
How ill the Creatures bear --
To Ache is human -- not polite --
The Film upon the eye
Mortality's old Custom --
Just...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
There is a looker-on who sits behind my eyes. I seems he has seen
things in ages and worlds beyond memory's shore, and those
forgotten sights glisten on the grass and shiver on the leaves. He
has seen under new veils the face of the one beloved, in twilight
hours of many a nameless star. Therefore his sky seems to ache with
the pain...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
How this tart fable instructs
And mocks! Here's the parody of that moral mousetrap
Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers
Approving chased girls who get them to a tree
And put on bark's nun-black
Habit which deflects
All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shape
In a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers,
Whether goat-thighed or god-haloed. Ever since that first Daphne
Switched her incomparable back
For a...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings
Vibrate most readily to minor chords,
Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words
Which voice the passion and the ache of things:
Illusions beating with their baffled wings
Against the walls of circumstance, and hoards
Of torn desires, broken joys; records
Of all a bruised life's maimed imaginings.
Now you are come! You tremble like a...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Vincent Benet
The grey gulls drift across the bay
Softly and still as flakes of snow
Against the thinning fog. All day
I sat and watched them come and go;
And now at last the sun was set,
Filling the waves with colored fire
Till each seemed like a jewelled spire
Thrust up from some drowned city. Soon
From peak and...Read more of this...
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